# Proxy-based Item Representation for Attribute and Context-aware Recommendation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.06145 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06145/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 64 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [Self-Attentive Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09781/) (2018)
- [Neural Collaborative Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.05031/) (2017)
- [BERT4Rec: Sequential Recommendation with Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06690/) (2019)
- [Image-based Recommendations on Styles and Substitutes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.04757/) (2015)
- [DeepFM: A Factorization-Machine based Neural Network for CTR Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04247/) (2017)
- [Prototypical Contrastive Learning of Unsupervised Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04966/) (2020)
- [S^3-Rec: Self-Supervised Learning for Sequential Recommendation with Mutual Information Maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.07873/) (2020)
- [No Fuss Distance Metric Learning using Proxies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07464/) (2017)
- [VBPR: Visual Bayesian Personalized Ranking from Implicit Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.01784/) (2015)
- [Sequential Recommender Systems: Challenges, Progress and Prospects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04830/) (2019)
- [Intent Contrastive Learning for Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.02519/) (2022)
- [Supporting Clustering with Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12953/) (2021)
- [Personalizing Session-based Recommendations with Hierarchical Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04148/) (2017)
- [Contrastive Learning for Cold-Start Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.05315/) (2021)
- [Continuous-Time Sequential Recommendation with Temporal Graph Collaborative Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06625/) (2021)
- [Learnable Embedding Sizes for Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.07577/) (2021)
- [Mixed Dimension Embeddings with Application to Memory-Efficient Recommendation Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11810/) (2019)
- [MAMO: Memory-Augmented Meta-Optimization for Cold-start Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03183/) (2020)
- [Learning to Embed Categorical Features without Embedding Tables for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.10784/) (2020)
- [Understanding Scaling Laws for Recommendation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.08489/) (2022)
- [Learning to Warm Up Cold Item Embeddings for Cold-start Recommendation with Meta Scaling and Shifting Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04790/) (2021)
- [Masked Contrastive Learning for Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08793/) (2021)
- [Lightweight Self-Attentive Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11333/) (2021)
- [CARCA: Context and Attribute-Aware Next-Item Recommendation via Cross-Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06519/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Generalizing Linear Autoencoder Recommenders with Decoupled Expected Quadratic Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.07402/) (2026)
- [Rethinking Convolutional Networks for Attribute-Aware Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.04723/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Neural network approaches in recommender systems have shown remarkable success by representing a large set of items as a learnable vector embedding table. However, infrequent items may suffer from inadequate training opportunities, making it difficult to learn meaningful representations. We examine that in attribute and context-aware settings, the poorly learned embeddings of infrequent items impair the recommendation accuracy. To address such an issue, we propose a proxy-based item representation that allows each item to be expressed as a weighted sum of learnable proxy embeddings. Here, the proxy weight is determined by the attributes and context of each item and may incorporate bias terms in case of frequent items to further reflect collaborative signals. The proxy-based method calculates the item representations compositionally, ensuring each representation resides inside a well-trained simplex and, thus, acquires guaranteed quality. Additionally, that the proxy embeddings are shared across all items allows the infrequent items to borrow training signals of frequent items in a unified model structure and end-to-end manner. Our proposed method is a plug-and-play model that can replace the item encoding layer of any neural network-based recommendation model, while consistently improving the recommendation performance with much smaller parameter usage. Experiments conducted on real-world recommendation benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models in terms of recommendation accuracy by up to 17% while using only 10% of the parameters.